Editorial staff at a council newspaper which has defied a crackdown on “Town Hall Pravdas” had average salary packages of more than £47,000, a Freedom of Information request has revealed.
East End Life continues to be published every week by Tower Hamlets Council despite a code of conduct introduced by communities secretary Eric Pickles last year which aimed to limit them to four times a year.
The Archant-owned East London Advertiser has long been campaigning against the council publication and submitted an FoI request about the costs involved.
The results of this show that £218,000 was spent on staff costs, meaning the 4.6 editorial employees at the title were on average remuneration packages of more than £47,000 – a significantly higher sum than the market rate for journalists in the regional press.
But the council has said that the figure for staff costs covers a range of salary grades and includes payments for National Insurance, pension contributions and other costs.
The Advertiser reports that graduate careers website Prospects states the average salary for all journalists is £24,500.
Tower Hamlets Council has justified its continued production of East End Life by arguing that its £1.2m budget is covered by revenue it receives from advertising but the FoI showed 49pc of its revenue came from internal advertising, paid for by the authority’s own departments.
Editor Malcolm Starbrook told HTFP: “The council is always saying that the paper funds itself. But a large amount of its revenue earned is coming from its own internal departments.”
He added the publication had affected the council’s spending with the Advertiser, which had fallen off as the paper had made criticisms of the council.
Said Malcolm: “The council are seeing the Advertiser as the main critic of the way it operates and it has used its funding in a way to punish us. Public notices have tailed off along with spending on particular projects.
“Because local authorities are allowed to manage news and information in the way that they want to, it is detrimental to the community and local democracy. It is a threat to the future of local journalism.”
East End Life goes out to 100,000 homes each week, while the council has also produced other publications including a 64-page What’s On guide.
Some councillors have also spoken out against the publication, with Conservative group leader Peter Golds saying: “The staff costs are unusually high. It’s farcical in many ways and needs to be stopped. It’s not a real newspaper – it’s a propaganda sheet.”
Kelly Powell, the council’s head of media, said: “East End Life staff are paid in line with salaries across the council and indeed across the public sector.
“We know these salaries are higher than some in the newspaper industry but staff salaries reflect the skills required to run a popular and well-read council publication.”
A spokeswoman for the council added: “You can’t equate this figure directly into paid salaries as it includes National Insurance, pensions contributions and on-costs. This figure includes a range of salary grades.
“East End Life is budgeted to be produced at net nil cost to the taxpayer and is better value for money than the alternatives.”
The Newspaper Society is to meet with Mr Pickles to urge him to speed up plans to bring into law his code of conduct, which would limit the publication of council newspapers to four times a year.
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I have no connection with Archant whatsoever but the way Tower Hamlets’ council is behaving is a truly shameful thing and sad for proper journalism: draining money away from an independent publication to fund its own propaganda rag. Imagine if David Cameron’s coalition government started pouring taxpayers’ money into creating its own national paper to rival the Times, Guardian, Telegraph, etc and then shoved said publication through the letter boxes of all properties across the country sending proper papers’ circulation plummeting. And every story in their Government Times was a good-news one about how well the Con/Lib Government was performing.
Kelly Powell’s comments are an insult to every hard-working regional reporter struggling by on sub-£20k wages.
£47k? Whatever. All the money those ‘journalists’ earn will never buy back their soul
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I’m not a fan of council publications masquerading as newspapers, but this story strikes me as poor in several respects. Firstly, so what if they are earning more at the council? The wage of £24,500 for journalists is scandalous in London. Is the suggestion that everyone should be as impoverished as journalists? Secondly, I would be amazed if that is the average wage for people who are essentially working only on a publication. Almost certainly it will include the head of department on a large wage which will inflate the average, despite the fact the head will be ultimately responsible for, but won’t have much day-to-day involvement in, the publication. You might as well compare the wage for a street cleaner with that of the Director of Environmental Services, who will be ultimately responsible for street cleaning, and bemoan the fact they are not the same.
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Outrageous abuse – both of the council’s own ratepayers and of local newspaper staff struggling to keep their genuine papers afloat in the current climate. The ‘journalists’ working for this rag should be ashamed of themselves.
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“We know these salaries are higher than some in the newspaper industry but staff salaries reflect the skills required to run a popular and well-read council publication.”
Absolutely. Those of us who’ve worked both for local authorities and traditional newspapers would I’m sure agree that council-produced ‘newspapers’ are far better designed and feature a truly independent mix of critical political comment alongside services made available by a mix of public and private sector providers and provide all the independent analysis of council performance and reportage of local life and issues that a tax payer needs.
The £47,000 figure (although probably distorted by the fact that the top officer responsible receives around £100,000) reflects the fact that professionals on such wonderful publications have to work four times as hard as regional and local journalists.
Please note: The opinions expressed herein in no way endorse any policies of Messrs Pickles, Cameron, Osborne or the other one whose name I forget with the attractive wife whom they wheel out when they have unpopular policies to announce.
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It strikes me that if any of the big newspaper groups, whose power has grown over the past 20 years, were to have control of this council newspaper, they would close it down. The newspaper groups have done more damage to local newspapers than any council publication.
It smacks of a ‘we want everything, so we can do what we like’ attitude. Look at the newspaper groups – wages are falling in real terms and jobs are being lost, as is quality at the headlong rush to make a profit for the shareholders. I don’t know what the council publication is like, but compared to some weeklies I’ve seen, council newspapers did a much better job. And 4.6 full time jobs? Surely there will be an editor, and in council circles, staff will be paid better than on newspapers. That’s the world.
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I’d like to add though, that criticising the journalists who work on such publications (and I announce an interest here) seems unfair. If a local authority were idiotic enough to offer me £47,000 to translate badly written emails from officers about their services into a semblance of plain English I would trouser the money and try to do the best job possible and shave money off the costs of the publication wherever possible to save taxpayer money.
When journalists are expected to work for £17,000 or £18,000 a year (£24,000 even in London seems a ludicrously high average figure) why on earth expect them to be martyrs when a fat pay packet is on offer? It’s perfectly possible to do your job, take home high wages and still maintain a conscience by refusing when you are occasionally asked to write things you know are downright lies.
It’s like criticising footballers for accepting obscenely high wages. It’s the clubs and the Murdoch and Sky millions-inflated European competitions that are obscene, after all.
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While 47K is staggeringly high, the newspaper industry is currently a far bigger threat to itself than any council publication will ever be.
If a paper’s business model is threatened to such an extent by a council publication, then it’s a bad model. Newspapers have spectacularly failed to move with the times, but instead of sorting it out, people working for them would rather whinge and whine and look for other people to blame. It’s pathetic.
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The jaw-dropping arrogance of the so-called head of media: “staff salaries reflect the skills required to run a popular and well-read council publication.”
In other words, the town hall staff are far superior to the low-paid oiks working on the Advertiser.
A massive and immediate reality check is called for, I would suggest.
Where’s Eric Pickles when you need him, eh?
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What a strange story, poorly reported. Staffing costs are not the same as salaries — they will include all overheads involved in employing the person, e.g. desks, chairs, computers, NI, etc. And as Hacker says, the conclusion is not that council journos are paid too much, but that journos in the wonderful market-driven private sector are paid too little. And because the free-market press no longer provides proper coverage of local councils, local government has to do the job itself. This is yet another story about the failure of the market and the greed of shareholder-led companies.
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Firstly – When calculating journalist’s average pay, does this include the salary of senior editors in an organisation? If not it should, because the Tower Hamlets figure will certainly included a manager position. I’m sure that would bump up the average.
Secondly – The TH figure includes off costs, such as pension/NI conts and the journalist one is for salary only. Probably not a massive difference, but still not comparing like with like.
Thirdly – The NUJ recognises the work done by employees working on council newspapers. It even says that the work is valuable in disseminating information. When the campaign against ‘council pravdas’ was in full swing, the NUJ was in support of the workers on these publications.
Fourthly – Council’s that run these publications are not systematically ‘punishing’ newspapers by not placing adverts with them. It is a simple economic question based on best value to teh tax payer. Every single local newspaper in the country has an advertising dept that offeres massive discounts as ad execs undercut colleagues in teh same dept so they can earn some commission. I’ve seen full page ads being sold for £50. However if a statutory advert comes in, the rate card comes out and it is never deviated from. If newspapers had given some leeway to councils a few years ago when they were asking for discounts, none would have set up their own papers. All would still be advertising with the local press. Just because they are public sector doesn’t mean everyone is stupid and willing to accept being ripped off.
You reap what you sew and short-term profiteering at the expense of tax payers, rather than building a fair working relationship is more to blame for this situation than councils wanting to indoctorinate the public with propaganda. That’s just a nice by-product.
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Oh, yeah – and why should the journalists be asahmed of themselves? What a load of crap. It’s got nothing to do with morals – we live in a capitalist society in case you hadn’t noticed and money makes the world go round.
Maybe next time you’re offered a pay rise in the local press, you shoudl turn it down for the sake of local democracy.
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Er, I don’t really see a problem here…
In good old British fashion we are complaining about workers being paid a decent salary instead of looking at, say, others higher up the greasy pole who are getting far too much. Bankers and politicians come to mind here.
The quoted total salary bill of £218K most likely includes employer pension contributions, employer NI and other deductions so it’s unlikely the staff will be on £47K each. It’s more likely they will be on a salary of sub £40K.
This sounds a lot to reporters but you have to remember the living costs in London, too. Still it’s a decent wage however you look at it.
The real rub is not that workers on the council paper are being paid too much but that reporters on local papers are being paid far too little.
Perhaps Archant should increase its wage rates so more of its staff in the capital, and indeed elsewhere, get a decent wage in line with Tower Hamlets salaries.
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Still chuckling over Rob’s “reap what you sew…”
Although I’m against the idea of Town Hall publications, we should withold the vitriol about the people who work on them. They are just trying to make a living like the rest of us. And we can’t blame them for the slave wages of our own industry.
And newspapers have sucked ratepayers dry for a century with huge charges to print boring public notices. No wonder councils are finding cheaper ways, including using their websites and their own publications.
A good paper will have annoyed the local council a million times anyway and newspaper companies should not bemoan the loss of council business. That’s legacy thinking. We can fight back by making the proper local paper so much better than the council claptrap one.
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No Suedhead, the real rub in these days of “all in it together” austerity is that a council thinks it’s okay to spend 250 grand on a preening vanity publishing project.
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God god – to the eejits defending the council, hear this:
Ratepayers pay the Council council tax so that the council then provides useful, municiple services.
A weekly newspaper is not a useful, municple service; certainly not at that cost.
Oh, what’s that, you’re a ratepayer too and you find it useful and an excellent read and you don’t mind paying for it? Well I don’t. If you’re happy to pay for Pravda week in, week out, hand over your money at a newsagents.
Idiots.
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Moaners
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Just to add, I’ve lived in Tower Hamlets for nearly a year and have neveer heard of the council’s East End Life paper. It’s not delivered to my flats and I’ve never seen it available anywhere else, not even a discarded copy blowing in the breeze. I see Archant’s paper in the Metro-style pick-up points all the time (and most weeks there’s another councillor scandal on the front page). If I were an advertiser, I know which I’d put my money into.
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You pesky sew and sew Olympic Breakfast. At least it shows you made it to the end of my rant.
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What’s the paper’s problem here? ‘They earn more than us, that’s not fair’?
Grow up.
Sheesh.
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